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Peter
Robinson is a best selling, award-winning author who, among
others, has won the Edgar Award, the CWA (UK) Dagger in the
Library Award, and Sweden's Martin Beck Award.
Peter Robinson, best known for his DCI Banks mysteries, has
released his 1995 No Cure for Love, originally published
in Canada. No Cure for Love is a fast paced police procedural
mystery that captures the Los Angeles entertainment business
atmosphere in the mid-1990's. The plot centers on a rising
British born TV actress who is being stalked by a person bent
on doing anything to prove his love for her, including murder.
One of the major currents in the story is the British actress
adapting to life and the pace of LA while struggling to bury
her previous life.
What I liked about the story was its fast paced plot, crisp
dialog and very believable characters -- from the detective
to the show business personalities. This is a tightly woven
story told from two third-person perspectives. One is the
main flow of the narrative primarily involving the actress
and detective working to solve the stalking. The other is
from the perspective of the stalker, who provides the story
with its eerie focus on the obsessive nature of a stalker.
The suspense is maintained until the very end of the story.
The interactions among the characters are well grounded in
reality and very believable. There are no heroics, no unnecessary
romantic sub-plots, and no over wrought dialog. The readers
of the DCI Banks series will be happy to see the identical
well-developed character approach to the story.
Although written only about twenty years ago, the Los Angeles
that Robinson describes seems a bit more distant than one
would expect. Robinson captured a 1995 Los Angeles that existed
before the Internet, cell phone proliferation, movie streaming
& cable channel explosion made the entertainment industry
a more fractured and complicated business than in 1995.
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